Road drugs also usually called street drugs are a serious social problem (see Singer M. Int J Drug Policy. 2008 December; 19(6):467-78), in that the abuse of road drugs not only leads to dependence and to serious diseases in the addicts, but it can lead to relevant risks in the community.
For instance, the number of road accidents due to drug assumption from drivers is dramatically increased in the recent years (Penning R. et al. Curr Drug Abuse Rev. 2010 March; 3(1):23-32). In particular, road-side studies indicate that 1-15% of drivers drive under the influence of one or more drugs of abuse. Indeed, after drug use, drivers do more often cause accidents than non-users.
Information on drugs and traffic safety comes from roadside studies, epidemiological research, experimental studies on driving-related skills, and on-the-road effective driving tests. Road-side studies show that drivers most frequently result positive to drug tests following the abuse of alcohol and/or cannabis.
Thus, the police force needs for a simple and effective test to quickly and selectively detect road drugs in drug addicts.
Actually, different apparatuses and tests have been developed for detecting the presence of drugs and validating this presence in biological fluids, for many purposes and for being applied on many categories of persons like drivers or jailed persons, etc. (Maurer H H. Anal Bioanal Chem. 2009 January; 393(1):97-107, Jaffee W B et al. J Subst Abuse Treat. 2007 July; 33(1):33-42, Schuckman H. et al. Subst Use Misuse. 2008; 43(5):589-95).
Some apparatuses are based on biochemical tests (Schuckman H. et al. Subst Use Misuse. 2008; 43(5):589-95).
These approaches are mainly suitable for performing drug tests both in the road and in the specialized centers for checking drugs in the addicts (hospitals, forensic medicine institutions etc).
Mass spectrometry technology, in its different configurations (e.g.: Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS), or Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS)), is widely used for validating and confirming the results of the drug tests that are used for detecting the presence of road drugs in a person (Maurer H H. Anal Bioanal Chem. 2009 January; 393(1):97-107).
In particular different applications have been developed for validating the presence of drugs and determining the respective amounts in various biological fluids like urine (Allen K R. Ann Clin Biochem. 2011 November; 48(Pt 6):531-41), blood (Moeller M R. The Drug Monit. 2002 April; 24(2):210-21), hair (Cooper G A Ann Clin Biochem. 2011 November; 48(Pt 6):516-30), skin (Levisky J A. et al. Forensic Sci Int. 2000 May 8; 110(1):35-46) and oral fluids (Allen K R. Ann Clin Biochem. 2011 November; 48(Pt 6):531-41, Schramm W. et al. J Anal Toxicol. 1992 January-February; 16(1):1-9).
An increasing number of toxicology laboratories are choosing to expand the services they offer to include hair testing in response to customer demands.
In fact hair provides the toxicologist with many advantages over conventional matrices in that it is easy to collect, is a robust and stable matrix that does not require refrigeration, and most importantly hair provides a historical profile of the exposure of an individual to drugs or analytes of interest.
The establishment of hair as a complementary technique in forensic toxicology is a direct result of the success of the matrix in medical legal cases and of the availability of a wide range of applications.
However, before introducing hair testing, laboratories must consider what additional requirements, that extend beyond the simple adaptation of known and validated methodologies for blood or urine, the laboratories will need to respect in order to effectively implement in the practice this hair testing.
The effective implementation of hair testing implies many challenges that are to be overcome, as the lack of control on the quality of the materials, the extensive protocols for handling the samples, and the low drug concentration in the hair thereby requiring a greater instrumental sensitivity for detecting the drug.
Moreover hair testing appears to be not optimal in order to control and check the abuse of road drugs from drivers.
This is essentially due to the fact that a positive result, as obtained by hair testing, does not demonstrate that the driver was necessarily under the drug effect.
In fact the road drug assumption might be occurred many days before the hair sampling and test time.
Thus, it is not possible to demonstrate that the person was under the drug effect when the test was performed on him, whereby the authorities cannot incriminate the checked person even if he resulted really positive according to the hair testing.
The same problem is also present in urine analysis that is a good checking test but not efficiently usable to demonstrate that the person is under the road drug effect.
The main biological fluid used and legally recognized from the authorities to demonstrate that drivers are under road drug effect is blood (Moeller M R. The Drug Monit. 2002 April; 24(2):210-21).
In many countries Immunochemical and Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) are still the state-of-the-art techniques for checking the presence of drugs in a person, while Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) is used to confirm the drugs assumption.
A promising and interesting new strategy and technique for detecting the assumption of road drugs from drivers is the so-called breath analysis or breath air analysis.
In particular different methodologies and applications, based on breath analysis, have been recently developed, wherein breath analysis is associated with mass spectrometry.
In fact, breath air is in contact with lung and related blood circulation, whereby an exchange of substances takes place between the air in the lung and the blood.
Thus, road drugs and related metabolites, when detected in the breathed out air, confirm that the same are present in blood and that the person is under the drug effect.
A device for sampling Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and its acid metabolite (THCCOOH) in breath has been recently studied and developed by the group of Beck (Beck et al. Journal of Analytical Toxicology, Vol. 35, October 2011).
In this study, breathed out air was sampled from 10 regular cannabis consumers and conveyed by suction through an Empore C 18 disk in order to retain the analytes of interest contained in the sample of air.
Then the analytes were extracted from the disk with hexane/ethyl acetate, and the resulting extract was evaporated, so as to gain dryness, and successively again dissolved in 100 μL of hexane/ethyl acetate.
Finally a rate of 3 μL of this solution was injected into the LC-MS-MS system and analyzed using positive electrospray ionization and selected reaction monitoring.
In the samples collected 1-12 hours after cannabis smoking, tetrahydrocannabinol was detected in all 10 persons.
The rate of excretion was between 9.0 and 77.3 pg/min. Identification of tetrahydrocannabinol was based on correct retention time relative to tetrahydrocannabinol-d(3) and correct product ion ratio.
In three samples, peaks were observed for tetrahydrocannabinol carboxylic acid, but these did not fulfill identification criteria.
Still, neither tetrahydrocannabinol nor tetrahydrocannabinol carboxylic acid was detected in the controls.
However, despite of the high quality of the results obtained by the authors, the above developed device, based on breath analysis, does not fit well for the control and validation tests, on the abuse of road drugs, that have to be performed by the police.
In fact, in the sampling and control procedure of the police when executing road drug tests, the following two points are essential and must be carefully considered:
a) two samples of the same breathed out air must be collected: the former to be used for checking the presence of drugs in the person that is subject to the drug test, and the latter to be used for purposes of validation and confirmation of this drug presence, whereas resulting from the former sample;
b) the traceability of the collection, storage and transportation of the sample must be always warranted, so as to certify that the sample has not been counterfeited before being subject to the instrumental analysis.
Briefly, at present there is a need for an apparatus or device, specifically based on breath analysis and adapted to be used to collect, sample and analyze drugs and the respective metabolites, that is designed and structured both for executing drug control and check-up tests, and for confirming the results of the drug control tests, so as in particular to be suitable for meeting the requirements of the police for performing road drug tests.
In the prior art there are also mentioned patent documents U.S. Pat. No. 5,834,626 A and EP 2 518 499 A1 which disclose portable devices for drug detection from exhaled breath.
However also these known devices appear to request further improvements in order to meet the above requirements, including in particular the confirmation of the results of the drug control tests.